What Peeple Tells Us About Privacy
2 min read
The latest Internet furor-de-jour is over an app called Peeple. This post is not going to get into the details or problems with the app, as other people have already done a great job with that.
In brief, the app allows anyone with a Facebook account to rate anyone else. No consent is needed, or asked. All a person needs to rate another person is their phone number.
As seen in the links above (and in a growing angry mob on Twitter), people are pointing out many of the obvious weaknesses in this concept.
The reason many people are justifiably furious about Peeple is that it allows strangers to rate us, and makes that rating visible as a judgment we potentially need to account for in our lives. However, what Peeple aims to do - in a visible and public way - is a small subset of the ways we are rated and categorized every day by by data brokers, marketers, human resources software, credit ratings agencies, and other "data driven" processes. These judgements - anonymous, silent, and invisible - affect us unpredictably, and when they affect us we often don't know about it until much later, if at all.
While Peeple is likely just a really bad idea brought to life by people with more money and time than sense, I'm still holding out hope that Peeple is a large scale trolling experiment designed to highlight the need for increased personal privacy protections.
